Sunday, September 5, 2010

OK, I wrote this back in June, and I have no idea why I didn't post it here.

I think part of the reason was because I wanted to sprinkle this post with links. Obviously I never got around to that, so I'm going to just dump this out there and hopefully at some other point, I'll be able to post properly.

So...

In June I went to the rheumatologist. At that point, my joints were swelled up more than was usual, and I had MORE affected joints at the moment than I have before. There are a few reasons for this: 1) a poorly tolerated probiotic 2) possibly one of their supplements and 3) unblanched almond flour. Apparently I CANNOT eat unblanched almond flour. It made me incredibly sick.

But according to my labs, I was better than ever before. All my disease markers were down.

Their theory is that a large percentage of people with rheumatoid arthritis are actually infected with a microorganism -- called mycoplasma.

Organisms in the genus mycoplasma are very small -- so small, in fact, they are virtually undetectable. They're single celled bacteria with no cell wall. They behave much like viruses and are capable of hiding in tissues -- tissues like your joints. Your body can't really detect them very well, seeing as they don't look like normal bacteria.

But even though traditional rheumatologists think people with RA have randomly malfunctioning immune systems, the doctors at this center believe that your immune system is reacting to something (mycoplasma infection). Thus, your immune system is NOT just going haywire in a random fashion.

Now, testing someone for mycoplasma infection doesn't work all that well. The tests are VERY expensive and difficult to do. So what the Arthritis Center does is put people on long term antibiotic therapy, and then they wait and see what will happen.

Eventually, if you are infected with a strain of mycoplasma (there are several), the antibiotics will be steadily killing them over time. And when they die, they can't hide any more, and they get flushed out of your joints and wherever else they are, and make it into the mainstream functions of your body as they are eliminated. They also will cause a temporary increase in inflammation, because they release toxins as they die.

Once you kill off a certain number of them (billions), your body finally 'sees' all the dead guys and goes, "Hey! Those are not supposed to be there!" and starts to produce antibodies.

Now, as I said, the doctors cannot detect mycoplasmas easily. But they can check for those antibodies.

And for the first time -- after more than a year! -- they found antibodies to a specific strain of mycoplasmas -- mycoplasma pneumoniae, to be exact.

What does this mean? It means I have a confirmed mycoplasma infection.

It also means that their therapy is working.

!

Pretty cool, huh?

When your doc starts talking about remission, that's pretty cool. :)

Anyway, he wrote me a prescription for a stronger anti-inflammatory and pain medication and sent me on my way.

Yay!

PART TWO

After thinking about this, I started to formulate a bit more about my theory with autoimmune diseases and infections such as mycoplasma. I think that everything starts with disordered digestion, which affects the immune system over time -- the standard leaky gut explanation. Due to disordered digestion, the immune system then becomes disordered.

This allows infections such as mycoplasma to take hold more easily.

OK, now, stay with me here.

Your child inherits the bacteria of the mother's digestive system. So if the mother has disordered digestion, that will be passed on to the child.

Mothers of autistic children have a higher incidence of autoimmune disorders than the general population.

Autistic children have a higher rate of gut dysfunction than their neurotypical peers.

So, is it a stretch to say that autistic children might also be suffering from a mycoplasma infection in addition to their disordered digestive and immune systems?

I don't think it is.

So I did more research.

Can mycoplasma be passed from mother to child? Yes.

Can mycoplasma cross the blood brain barrier? Yes.

Can doxycycline and minocycline, the drugs used to treat mycoplasma infection, cross the blood brain barrier? Yes.

So could some cases of autism be caused by the effects of mycoplasma infection of the brain?

And could they be treated similarly to the way I'm being treated right now?

...

This gives a whole new meaning to the "feeding bad bacteria" portion of straying from the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. Starving bad bacteria through the digestive system has a systemic effect. It stands to reason that it starves out the parasitic mycoplasma bacteria strains as well as imbalanced digestive bacteria.

I don't know all the answers here, but I am compelled to discuss this with my rheumatologist at my next appointment.

I want guidance and I want answers, and I want people to not think I'm crazy. I sometimes dream that I am telling people about the dietary changes we've made and the great strides we've also made, and they ignore me and mock me.

Sigh.

So this is the post I've been meaning to make for months. Hopefully I can clean it up with appropriate references at some point. Thanks for listening.

For now, I'm hanging in there. My rheumatoid arthritis disease activity is way down. I'm now only seeing a rheumatologist every three months, and I'm on antibiotics and an NSAID, not a DMARD.

My son is about to start third grade. We've decided to go with a special ed aid for him this year due to ballooning class sizes in California. The distraction will be difficult, so this is for the best and hopefully a temporary measure.

The interview with the gynecologist blew me away. I had HORRIBLE morning sickness throughout my entire pregnancy, and after I went into labor, I could keep nothing down. Even then, it seems my dysfunctional processing of carbs was to blame. :(

Monday, May 31, 2010

There's been a lot of talk about salt reduction lately. Of course, many doctors still tell people to cut back on salt intake if they have high blood pressure.

However, many physicians now know that this tactic only works on a small percentage of salt-sensitive people.

Here's a quote from Mary Dan Eades, MD, on the issue:

Even if the point is to reduce high blood pressure, only a tiny minority of people who have elevated blood pressure have what’s called “salt sensitive” hypertension. For the rest, cutting sodium has been shown not only not to help but possibly to be downright detrimental.

Now I happen to think that Mary Dan Eades is a pretty smart cookie. I started to do my own research into studies with salt, and to be honest, there are just too many for me to do a quick rundown.

But I think the New York Times article really says it all, without drawing a more obvious conclusion.

Personally, I happen to think that upwards of 3000 mg of sodium chloride per day is excessive, although not in and of itself unhealthy. So what's the big deal about?

Here's a very interesting passage from that NY Times article:

The power that salt holds over processed foods can be seen in an American snack icon, the Cheez-It.

At the company’s laboratories in Battle Creek, Mich., a Kellogg vice president and food scientist, John Kepplinger, ticked off the ways salt makes its little square cracker work.

Salt sprinkled on top gives the tongue a quick buzz. More salt in the cheese adds crunch. Still more in the dough blocks the tang that develops during fermentation. In all, a generous cup of Cheez-Its delivers one-third of the daily amount of sodium recommended for most Americans.

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

In that demonstration, Kellogg basically admitted that some of their most popular, heavily processed foods taste like garbage without salt.

And, well, you know how I feel about processed food, right?

The unvarnished truth is that people need to eat less processed foods. Salt hides the truth from them, and really, that's its only crime, if you're going to assign one.

Personally, I have not had much trouble with sunburn, despite rarely using sunscreen, being outside several times a week, and living in southern California. Yet when I was a child, I burned often.

I would still use sunblock if I were to go to the beach, and I would use it on my son as well. But for normal daily exposure or for a few hours at the park or the pier, I'm really not concerned about sunblock anymore.

Friday, April 30, 2010

I haven't made beef stew in a while. This time I thought I'd write down my basic recipe. :)

You're going to need some SCD legal beef stock, so make that first.

BEEF STOCK

1.5 pounds beef marrow bones or shank boneswater

Toss the bones into your crockpot with a quartered onion, some garlic, a few carrots, some whole peppercorns, a glug of vinegar, and a stick of celery if desired. Heat on high until the mixture comes to a simmer.

Leave your crock pot on whatever temperature keeps the mix bubbling. Check it every six hours or so and add more water.

Strain and discard bones and veggies after 24 hours.

OK, so you should have somewhere in the neighborhood of six cups of stock, if you used a 4 quart crockpot.

Brown the beef (in batches if you have to) with onions and a little olive oil (or reserved bacon grease - yum!). I used five pounds of beef and so I browned it in two batches, with one onion per batch.

Dump the beef into a very large stock pot with the six cups of stock. Deglaze your pan with the red wine. This is a fancy way of saying pour the wine in, let it bubble for a second, and then scrape out all the delicious bits and wine into your stew pot.

Add the beans, carrots, spinach, tomato juice, garlic, thyme and bay leaves. Check the liquid level in your pot -- you don't want it too full, and if you're using frozen veggies, make sure you leave enough room for the melted ice water. Bring to a boil and then simmer with a splatter shield on or a lid slightly ajar. Add water as necessary until the meat is done and falling apart (this can take an hour or longer).

Is this a lot of work? Kind of. But most of the steps are just you throwing stuff in a pot and walking away. Plus, you end up with a huge amount of leftovers, so I'm OK with it. :)

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

I've had a recipe for chai for a while now, and I haven't really had much success with it. Until today, anyway!

This is a nice, mild chai recipe. I'm not going to lie to you -- if you want to make your own chai, you're going to have to order some special stuff for it. Luckily, it's not too hard to find. Penzeys and The Spice House offer whole spices that are SCD legal, and The Spice House offers muslin bags.

I know, I know, muslin bags? In essence, to make your own chai, you need to make your own tea bag. Muslin bags are inexpensive and reusable, so don't forget to order a few when you order your chai spices.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

I'm actually in the midst of a bit of a cooking marathon. I've got marrow bones in the crock pot for 24 hour beef broth, I made Murgh Kabuli for lunch, I've got green beans steaming, and I just finished making these ginger spice cookies.

I've still got to make hard boiled eggs and hamburgers, but I thought I'd take a little break. :)

I've tried to make ginger spice cookies before and they were a dismal failure. I have been trying to clean out a completely full notebook of mine, and thus I came across the failed recipe today. With a few tweaks, I had success! So here you go.

These cookies taste light and not too sweet. I think with raisins they'd make a great fake oatmeal raisin cookie!

Grease two cookie sheets with extra shortening. Beat all ingredients together and drop onto trays, about 2" apart or so. Bake at 325 (or 300, depending on your oven) degrees for about 15 minutes -- watch the bottoms for burning. Cookies should be evenly golden brown.

Makes about 14 cookies.

Let them cool completely... if you can wait that long. We couldn't. :)

EDITS: I changed the temperature, and I added the word "Italian" to the recipe. I am Italian, so I figure I'm allowed. LOL.

Obviously this isn't an authentic recipe, but it's close enough for me!

I never had the chance to really fall in love with Indian food, before I learned that I wasn't going to be able to eat a whole bunch of foods. I do remember sharing a meal with my very best friend from college, and dipping naan into palak paneer, which I thought was absolutely amazing. That was the only time I enjoyed Indian food before realizing I was unable to eat gluten.

So I've been interested in trying more ethnic recipes for some time.

I cobbled this together from a variety of sources; I expect it would work well in a crock pot too.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

I know I haven't posted here for a while, but I had some good reasons.

One of the reasons was because we took a very short vacation. This is significant because we haven't actually had a vacation in seven years!

But, of course, drama must ensue.

The week before we left, our oven broke. The stovetop still worked, but the heating element in the oven was completely broken. Not only that, maintenance had to order the part. So I was stuck having to cook food for a trip with no oven.

What's an SCD girl to do?

Well, Pecanbread came to the rescue! I couldn't make my son's favorite almond butter brownies, so instead I used the nut butter pancake recipe found here.

I'll post it below for the peeps too lazy to click the link:

PLAIN NUT BUTTER PANCAKESby Caroline

1 tablespoon nut butter1 whole egg2 egg yolksdash of baking soda

Of course, I had to adapt this into traveling food proportions.

So I used a 16 oz jar of almond butter and 20 eggs, along with a teaspoon or so of baking soda and a teaspoon or so of salt. And then I cooked a stack of flapjacks like you have never seen!

All went well with the recipe, but they turned out kinda bland. Still, though, I will definitely tinker with this further in the future, and served with honey, they were pretty good. I will definitely make these again.

Other than that, well, I live in Los Angeles, so I fired up the grill and cooked six pounds of hamburgers to take with us. I also had three or four pounds of leftover chicken in the refrigerator, so I made a chicken salad with olive oil, vinegar, and SCD legal spices.

I brought the normal veggies and grape juice jello to round it all out. So the trip was saved.

I was very much hoping to post my almond butter biscotti recipe, but I need to make it again. In fact, I was going to make them to take with us on our trip, but because of the oven fiasco, that wasn't possible.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

I popped over to Jimmy Moore's blog for a few minutes to see how he was doing.

If you're familiar with Jimmy Moore at all, he's lost over 100 pounds on a low carb diet. He has no heart blockages to speak of (yes, he's been tested) and he lost his brother to heart disease.

Over the past two years, he's gained some weight, inexplicably. He's lost some of it, but he's being tested for thyroid issues right now. All in all, he's a great guy.

He recently blasted Whole Foods for going with conventional wisdom and promoting a whole grains, low-fat based diet -- that same diet that has made many people sick and fat.

Arguably, a diet like that is the reason people go on SCD. Grains are extremely hard for people to digest, and refined grains are like pure sugar that feed all kinds of naughty bacteria. Add that to a history of antibiotic use (I myself had probably been on antibiotics more than 20 times before I was 20 years old), and you've got a recipe for gut dysfunction.

I was most disturbed by the comments section of the article, though. A lot of vegetarians outright mocked Jimmy for what they thought was an overweight guy. Jimmy is a HUGE man, but I wouldn't exactly call him fat. He's kind of like the Jolly Green Giant. Very huggable!

The other problem I had was that people automatically think low carb diets equal all meat diets. That's just not true. Jimmy eats a salad every day. I know, because he blogs about it. Most low carbers enjoy leafy greens, tomatoes, and fruits like berries.

Now I believe in real food. There are an awful lot of vegetarians who don't. But some do. And for the most part, our similarities outweigh our differences, so we shouldn't be fighting. Here's why.

Most low carbers who believe in real food will agree with vegetarians -- that factory raised meats are bad, that free range doesn't really mean much. The difference is that real food advocates who are meat-eaters will seek out pastured, organic meats. We don't believe in needless suffering and we don't believe in consuming unhealthy forms of meat. Those are commonalities.

Real food advocates (both vegetarian and not) also know the health dangers posed by overconsumption of polyunsaturated fats. It's the same reason that conventional beef is unhealthy -- the fat in conventional beef is bad because they are fed grain and corn, which are both very high in omega-6 fats.

The fat in corn oil is also bad for you for the same reason.

And that is why grains are bad for you -- they are filled with inflammatory omega-6. Yes, your body needs a small amount of omega-6, but we're consuming huge amounts that we'd never be able to consume or produce in a natural setting. Could you produce corn oil or refined flour without machinery? Of course you couldn't. It's not natural nor healthy to eat large amounts of those foods.

So while the vegetarians will likely mention that conventionally raised beef is bad for you, they won't draw that distinction back to the source of the problem -- grains.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

There was a post on the Fat head blog about raw milk, and I thought I'd take a little bit of time to do some research on it.

The basic position of raw milk proponents is that pasteurized milk is not as digestible as raw milk. The pasteurization process kills off beneficial enzymes and changes the protein structure of the milk.

I can buy that. Ultra high pasteurized milk doesn't even need to be refrigerated. That's kind of disgusting.

My main concern with raw milk is about the possibility of contamination with e. coli and other pathogens. There are several disease outbreaks attributed to raw milk.

Now, I'm not saying that all raw milk producers make contaminated products. The risk may be low, but it's still there.

And if you're following the SCD, chances are you have a compromised immune system. A compromised digestive system goes hand in hand.

So if you have compromised digestion, you should probably avoid raw milk. If you wish to use it for yogurt, you should heat it yourself slowly to kill pathogens, as Elaine recommended in Breaking the Vicious Cycle.

I have even more reason to avoid raw milk products, because I am on long-term antibiotic therapy.

If I were to be exposed to e. coli, my antibiotic use could destroy my kidney function, land me in the hospital, and/or kill me. Antibiotics are expressly contraindicated in e. coli infection.

Please keep these concerns in mind, should you decide to try raw milk products.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Some great stuff gets mentioned in this post -- like how canola and soybean oils are still considered good for you by major so-called "health" food manufacturers. Yuck.

Stick with olive oil, and look for sardines packaged similarly (or in water). Use whatever SCD legal cheese you like as well. I'm no purist when it comes to cheese. Whatever works.

Sorry for the lack of recipes. I have them scrawled in my notebook, even with photos that are saved on my computer! But I've been so busy writing and trying to find a job, they are languishing a bit. I'll have to rectify that situation soon.

There was no relationship between heart disease/stroke risk and saturated fat consumption.

So grab a stick of grass fed butter (cow or goat, your choice) and head on over to the Fat Head blog. Tom Naughton does a pretty great breakdown of the study's results here. He also includes another meta-analysis that basically shows the same thing.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Food Renegade wrote a FANTASTIC post on agave nectar. Man, I'm jealous. I wish I'd written it. But here we are.

Some highlights:

--There is nothing natural about agave nectar--It is not safe for diabetics--It can massively raise your triglyceride levels--Half the carbohydrate content is from highly indigestible inulin, making it SCD illegal.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

At the last minute, I decided to make Clark some cookies for Christmas. They were with almond flour, and they were egg free. I thought that there was no way this silly recipe would work, but it did. The cookies stayed together when cool as well!

I got the recipe from Comfy Belly's section of SCD legal recipes. I recommend you check it out.